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From the Ethics of the Fathers: "He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it."

Sunday, August 14, 2016

Counting The Palestinians - Caroline Glick

Assessing the dimensions of the demographic threat.

In a surprise move last month, Hamas announced it will be
participating in the Palestinian municipal elections in October. The
Palestinian Authority’s Fatah leadership greeted Hamas’s announcement
with deep and understandable anxiety. Hamas is expected to win control
over a significant number, perhaps even a majority of municipal and
local governments in Judea and Samaria. PA leader Mahmoud
Abbas (whose own fiveyear term in office ended six years ago) and his
Fatah comrades aren’t the only ones worried. Last week, Yediot
Aharonot’s military commentator, Alex Fishman, reported that the IDF’s
senior leadership is also deeply concerned.

According to Fishman, in recent weeks Defense Minister Avigdor
Liberman has held a series of senior-level discussions, initially
convened to discuss long-term Israeli strategic options in Judea and
Samaria. Due to the IDF’s concerns over the elections, those discussions
quickly devolved into a more limited discussion of how to prevent a
Hamas electoral victory. Fishman reported that the top
generals have convinced Liberman, who until now supported octogenarian
Abbas’s swift retirement, that “it is Israel’s interest not only for Abu
Mazen [Abbas] to remain in power, but to empower him still further.”
To this end, according to Fishman, Liberman has agreed to adopt a plan
prepared by the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories
(COGAT), for Israel to transfer the Civil Administration’s planning and
zoning authority in Area C to the PA. The plan also involves
retroactively authorizing tens of thousands of Palestinian structures
built illegally in Area C and authorizing the construction of a new
Palestinian urban center in Area C. Area C, it should be
recalled, constitutes some 60 percent of Judea and Samaria. It has a
negligible Palestinian population. All of the Israeli communities are
located in Area C. The IDF holds sole security control over the area.
Area C is the only area where the Civil Administration retains
governing functions. Areas A and B, where all the major Palestinian
population centers are located, have been autonomously governed by the
PA for 20 years. The IDF’s plan is startling on several levels.
Since the earliest years of the Oslo peace process with the PLO,
retaining Israeli control over planning and zoning powers in Area C has
been a central goal of Israeli policy. Israel’s retention of these
powers has enabled the IDF to retain security control over Area C and so
defend not only the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, which are
all located in Area C, but to defend Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and the rest
of Israel’s major urban centers as well. Why would the IDF
recommend conceding these strategic interests just as Hamas is poised to
gain significant power in Judea and Samaria? Even more to the point,
what is the basis of the IDF’s assessment that by conceding these
strategic assets Israel will enhance – let along guarantee – Fatah’s
chances of winning in October? For the past 16 years, Israeli
concessions have only served to make the Palestinians more contemptuous
and hateful toward us. Consider the case of the Gaza
withdrawal. That operation, undertaken 11 years ago this week, was the
largest single strategic concession Israel has made to the Palestinians
in the past 23 years. The Palestinians responded to Israel’s
forcible expulsion of 10,000 of its citizens, the destruction of their
communities and the withdrawal of all its security forces from Gaza by
destroying the greenhouses Israel had given them free of charge and
torching the synagogues it left behind. Then five months later, they elected Hamas to lead them.
The actual harm that a Hamas electoral triumph will cause Israel is
also completely unrelated to the IDF’s recommended course of action. If
Hamas rises to power in various local governments in Judea and Samaria,
the change will harm Israel in two ways. First, in
municipalities dominated by Hamas, we can expect for Fatah security
forces to stop their anti-Hamas operations. This change will require the
IDF to increase the tempo of its counterterror operations.
How will this be facilitated by giving up control over land policy in
Area C? Second, with Hamas rising in power in the PA’s bureaucracy, we
can expect for the PA to increase the amount of money it transfers
monthly to the Hamas regime in Gaza. To mitigate the damage,
Israel will need to aggressively target foreign governmental and NGO
funding to the PA in accordance with binding international and domestic
terrorism financing statutes. Here too, Israel’s task has
nothing whatsoever to do with permitting the PA to conduct building
projects on a massive scale in Area C. Finally, even
disregarding the fact that the IDF’s plan has no relationship whatsoever
to the expected consequences of a Hamas electoral victory, it is hard
to understand the intrinsic logic of the idea. Is the IDF
suggesting that Israel will give planning and zoning powers to a Hamas
dominated PA in Area C? Or is it suggesting that the concession would be
contingent on a Fatah victory? If the latter is the case, why do the
generals believe that the Palestinians whose hatred for Israel is
endemic, will be more likely to vote for Fatah because Israel is tipping
the scales in Fatah’s favor? The practical irrelevance and strategic
irrationality of the army’s recommended course of action make it hard to
avoid the conclusion that the generals went into their meetings with
Liberman with the goal of preventing him from developing a relevant
strategy for contending with the elections specifically and the
Palestinians in general. Fishman implied that this was the
case when he noted that COGAT has been lobbying for two years to give up
planning and zoning powers and legalize tens of thousands of illegal
Palestinian structures in Area C. It is no secret that the
IDF General Staff continues to support the strategic goal of Israeli
withdrawal from Judea and Samaria either in the framework of a peace
deal with the PLO, or if necessary with no deal. So it makes sense that
they use every perceived crisis as a means to advance this goal, even
though both the two-state policy and the unilateral withdrawal policy
failed completely years ago. The main objective motivation
for the IDF’s arguably insubordinate behavior is the generals’ desire to
avoid dealing with Israel’s demographic challenge. This is a challenge
Israel has worked to avoid facing since it ended Jordanian occupation of
Judea and Samaria in 1967. Israel has a dilemma with regards
to Judea and Samaria. It needs to control the areas for security
reasons. It wishes to control the areas because they are the cradle of
Jewish civilization. But it fears retaining control over them because it
wishes to retain its massive Jewish majority. Israelis worry
that adding the Palestinians to the population registry will destroy
that three quarters majority. If that happens, so the thinking goes,
Israel will lose its international legitimacy on the one hand, and end
the Zionist dream of Jewish sovereignty on the other.
Regarding the issue of international legitimacy, events over the past 16
years have shown that international sentiment towards Israel is not
positively impacted either by Israeli concessions to the Palestinians or
by the Palestinians’ open rejection of Israel’s right to exist. To the
contrary, ever since the Palestinians rejected statehood in July 2000
and opted for perpetual war with Israel, the level of international
support for them has continuously risen, while support for Israel,
particularly in the West, has consistently eroded. This state
of affairs indicates that there is no direct correlation, and there may
indeed be an indirect correlation between Israel’s international status
and its willingness to make territorial concessions to the
Palestinians. Consequently, Israel should not take the issue of
international legitimacy into account in its strategic discussions of
its long-term policy goals in Judea and Samaria. As for our
genuine domestic concerns, the truth is that if adding the Palestinians
of Judea and Samaria to Israel’s population registry as permanent
residents or citizens destroys Israel’s Jewish majority, then we will
need to suffice with something less than complete sovereignty over Judea
and Samaria. The problem with determining how to proceed is that we simply don’t know what will happen.
We have no idea how many Palestinians live in Judea and Samaria. All
we have are competing unofficial estimations of that number.
The Left ascribes to the demographic doomsday scenario. Based entirely
on PA population data, the Left insists that Jews will cease to be the
majority west of the Jordan River almost immediately if we aren’t
already the minority. Consequently, leftists charge that
anyone who recognizes that the two-state formula and the unilateral
withdrawal option have failed is the moral equivalent of an
anti-Zionist. The Right argues that the Palestinian
population data are deliberately fabricated. In 2005, the independent
American-Israeli Demographic Research Group published its first in-depth
assessment of the Palestinian data. That study, and follow- on studies
in subsequent years demonstrated that the Palestinians exaggerated their
population size by 50 percent, adding some 1.5 million people to their
population rolls that simply do not exist. Based on the
AIRDG’s data, and on the fact that Israel’s fertility rates are higher
than Palestinian fertility rates in Judea and Samaria, and that Jewish
immigration rates to Israel are rising steeply while Palestinian
emigration rates remain high, the Right has concluded that far from
being a threat, demographics are a strategic asset for Israel.
Unfortunately, none of this is the least helpful to Liberman, or
anyone else, frankly. So long as we don’t have official, accepted
Israeli data on the size of the Palestinian population, we cannot have a
real debate about our strategic options going forward. And as Liberman insists, we need such a debate.
We need to conduct a reassessment of our relations with the
Palestinians in Judea and Samaria regardless of the results of the
municipal elections. To this end, Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu should appoint a team to find out just how many Palestinians
there are, and, no, Israel won’t need to send census workers to knock on
doors in Ramallah or Jenin to accomplish this goal. We won’t even need
to rely on PA data. All we need to determine the size of the
Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria is a team of researchers
capable of analyzing aerial photographs of Judea and Samaria, of
interpreting Palestinian electricity and water usage data, and of
collecting emigration data from the crossing points to Jordan and from
Ben Gurion Airport. To minimize the danger that the data will
be politicized, Netanyahu should appoint representatives of the warring
demographic factions to the study group where they will be joined by
analysts from the National Security Council. There are no
magic solutions to our problems with the Palestinians. But there are
options other than repeating let alone expanding on failed policies. To develop these options, Israel needs to know the dimensions of the demographic threat.

Caroline Glick is the Director of the David Horowitz Freedom Center's Israel Security
Project and the Senior Contributing Editor of The Jerusalem Post. For
more information on Ms. Glick's work, visit carolineglick.com. Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/263830/counting-palestinians-caroline-glick Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.